Permission to Rant?

*This long overdue post is dedicated to Gabrielle (because I'm a man of my word...from now on)

There’s a saying somewhere that goes “To fight and fail is to have lived; but to miss chances, to cower in the corner when opportunity knocks, though having ample chance and choice to do otherwise, this is akin to dying in the womb.”

Okay, there’s really no saying that goes like that. This has been completely made up on this page. I’m sure there are great and valiant words etched in stone somewhere, some of them present here. Words about brave men and women who charged against death, who created new worlds of possibility, who foresaw the future ripeness of their labors—such words usually precede the heroes for whom they have been written. In fact, one wonders if and if so how humankind ever summoned the courage to conquer its fears, especially the fear of inadequacy, of failure. Is there a greater dread for someone who cares about life than to fail at it utterly? Well, if my new quote holds any truth, the answer is “no”; however, the only way to fail here is to hesitate in the face of fear. So—deep breath—now is always the moment to proceed somewhere, anywhere, if but cautiously.

Perhaps this is a lame first topic for an essay series: the author shouldn’t have to justify why he is in the act of writing in the first place. Or should he? What if most of the writing in the world is done purely for the pleasure of the writer? Or, worse yet, what if it’s done out of boredom, like masturbation—the writer deriving no real lasting pleasure from the act, merely gratifying himself through the release. Well, so what? In the end it isn’t about the writer but the message. And here and now the message is the need to write. But what about? Does it make any sense to conjure up motivations for writing? Isn’t the point of writing—like masturbation—to get something out that NEEDS to be gotten out? An artist who employs mental motivation exercises is pathetic and useless—like a long-distance runner who really just wants to get where he’s going but doesn’t like the journey. “Anathema!” I shout.

Perhaps writing should be conceived thus: “a solitary activity, an amassing of pensive moments, and a large lump of material content to mold and sculpt into a meaningful output.” I think my fear and that of so many apprehensive writers is that our content is unwieldy or to monumental, that our tools of insight and zeal will not do justice or add anything of value to the areas we attempt to illuminate. Spaces have been filled by hundreds of thousands of writers throughout history, filling millions of books—where do we belong? And the result of this self-doubt is indefinite paralysis, failing to live up to our potential in many ways.

It is self-doubt, the doubting of our worthiness to add anything to the Edifice, which causes this paralyzing fear. And if this is true perhaps what we need is a kind of affirmation that will give us the encouragement to continue and to produce our desired fruits of labor. But what kind of affirmation will give us this courage? I think we first need to be aware of a few truths about the world around us before we can say anything about our abilities:

First, let us acknowledge that the whole of society that we live in is comprised of flesh, blood and minds, and of these things alone. Whatever resources we use and materials we fabricate are not compositions of our society, but products of it. It seems that many of us forget this in our obsession with objects, even mistaking our gadgets for friends (in a sense). For example, a car is a nice thing to have, but it is certainly not a member of any society, nor is a cell phone or a pair of jeans or a house or an airplane. None of these things can think or do for themselves. But even our household pets and farms animals have the ability to move and eat, to play and suffer. This kind of being can be considered a member of a society, but if and only if humans recognize them to have these characteristics. The moment we forget that cats and dogs can feel misery is the moment they cease to belong to our society. Also, we did not create these abilities in them, so they cannot be products of our society. In addition, few people would consider the earth and its resources to actually be “part of society”, though they are essential to every society on the planet. Let us thus construe society in the broad sense as containing only those elements which are living and capable of suffering.

Second, let us acknowledge that the evolvement of our society is important in who we are as actors. Certain societal systems can limit our freedom and our capacity to create and to investigate the world. But let us not fall into thinking that there is some measurable “progress” that has been achieved in our modern society with regard to the centrality of the value of personal creation within societies—importance must be somewhat relative. What do I mean by this? Just that in both ancient kingdoms and modern democracies, in Communist states and feudal hierarchies, creative products—be they writings, oral stories, artifacts, music—have played equally relevant and integral roles. Of course they have played extremely different roles in each kind of society in every era of history. Technology and infrastructural development have always shifted the ease of creation and the motivations for creating: In Ancient Egypt, the few that could write and create art were the Scribes; in Rome this honor was extended to the politicians, poets and record-keepers; in Renaissance Europe it was the upper-echelon of society and those artists who had patrons; more and more the resources dictated who could create, usually out of simple availability of supplies—the laws of supply and demand. On the other hand, throughout human history the freedom to create was deliberately stolen from members of society by those in power in order to stay in power.

As much as we have been shaped by our society, we must admit that our creative role as individuals in any place at any time whatsoever throughout history is always equal, always transient, and always pregnant with possibility. We can always add to that great edifice of ideas that humanity has built throughout history, although the availability of resources has increased (statistically) our opportunities immeasurably. Whether it was in the days of the Pharaohs when an elite scribe etched into the face of an obelisk his own slight augmentation of a story about the annual wheat harvest, or today as some lower-income shlub hovers over his PC in the middle of the night critiquing the latest independent film—itself a masterpiece of felicity and Will—on his blogsite, a dark and complex genius at work beneath the figurative citadels of power. He has faith in himself and knows that his efforts amount to something meaningful because of their inherent value: their artistic merits, the timeless forms that have been thrown into the work—the precise, the painting, the palimpsest.

What has been considered incidental is in fact profoundly important—the Truth of the work. What had seemed meaningful and rightly authoritative has been denuded as vulgar pretense—that endless stream of so much safe and marketable pap, the citadels. The cities of Power and control of creation that tower on top of that lowly mad scientist need not necessarily be ugly and artless; but they reek of self-importance and assumed permanence, as if the moment of all moments in the history of creativity were always and at once to be determined by their next fiat. This arrogance should be reserved for something truly eternal, not transitory. And because all societies and moments of great historical import are felicitous and transitory, we should hold this notion of permanence to be, thankfully, wrong.

Ahhhhhhhh…To return to the affirmation we need to eliminate fear of worthlessness, to get off our asses and create…I suppose a brief illustration would work best. If we imagine in the world all the writers working on basement computers, all the studio [apartment] artists holed up in their offices/living spaces, all the budding rock stars laying down riffs on pirated software in their parents’ houses, the sum of all independent creative output, contained in a single bell jar within the walls of an exurban industrial office complex—how would the fusion of this erstwhile constellation of ideas impact the future of art and thought? Would these felicitous moments that have given us such a rich history still occur? Is it even fathomable that a Jimi Hendrix or Tennessee Williams or Lao Tsu could be birthed by such a monoculture, a national or international “School of Thought”? Of course it is not. And the idea of such a commune is absurd. But then this should help us to appreciate the position of the free-agent artist. And it should tell us that not only is it okay and useful to lob your ideas and art into the public sphere, but that it is essential that many people with creative insights do this in order to move our society in meaningful human directions. Creative bursts and brilliant acts of faith are the stuff of history and our current state of society affords us just as much opportunity to take these actions. Despite the seeming saturation of the market, regardless of the fact that everyone and their dog is a blogger or vlogger, and not to mention that most people in this 3-second download culture are too busy screaming and browsing to listen to anything but the competing screams and beaming browsed banner ads of others, talking to themselves on the street and in their cars and on buses and subways, spitting out incessant vacuous vague straws of meaning called “Tweets” into overpopulated social networking glory-hole gossip parties while pornographic pop-ups shatter our already fractured focus!….(whew)—despite this chaotic reality, unreality, surreality that the many-most of us subject ourselves to on a daily and nightly basis, we can take solace in the existence of our shlub. Because even if the genius shlub is indistinguishable from the babbling incoherent shlub population, his Work isn’t. And all it takes is time and effort before the shlub produces an oeuvre worthy of notice—even if that oeuvre is a blog.

This might be a little long for a daily affirmation, but in felicity it has been written.